Michael Ledwidge - Alert

“Do you recognize him?” he said.

The picture was of a pale young teenager with a slightly misshapen shaved head. His eyes weren’t exactly level with each other. He was more than a little loony-looking, but I kept that to myself.

“No. Should I know him?” I asked.

“Yes. He was on the cover of the Daily News last year.”

Too bad I read the Post , I thought, not knowing where this could be going.

“Did something happen to your son?”

“I’m a thinker, an introvert, a shut-in, some might say,” the Russian continued. “I like books. Math, physics, mechanics, engineering, abstract things. But back in my twenties, I was a little more outgoing, and I had a dalliance with a stripper.”

“One of my workers,” said the old man. “I owned four clubs in Miami at the time. It was his twenty-first birthday. The least I could do.”

Father of the year, I thought.

“So she got pregnant, and Mikhail was born. He had problems from day one. Birth defects, then a diagnosis of autism, then schizophrenia. All these stupid diagnoses just to say he was mentally not okay.”

“Years of psychologists and medication and my favorite — therapy,” said the old man, disgusted. “Bullshit! All of it!”

“They wanted to institutionalize him,” the son continued. “But I said no. I knew there was somebody in there. Somebody smart who could be funny and who just needed to be watched over. So I took care of him. I raised him by my side; he was with me all the time. He was a big pain in my ass, but he was smart. We would play chess and cards. He was so good at cards. Could add in his head almost as fast as me.”

The son looked down at the floor wistfully as he took a breath.

“In 2012, he was doing okay enough that I was able to leave him with an aide every once in a while. The aide, I thought, was a good man, but he turned out to be not so good. Because he smoked dope and fell asleep one morning while I was at an engineering conference in Philly, and Mikhail left the apartment alone.

“He got on the subway, and I don’t know what happened, but that morning in upper Manhattan, he pushed a woman in front of the number one train.”

“At a Hundred and Sixty-Eighth Street,” I said, vaguely remembering the case now. “That’s why you blew it up.”

“Yes,” the son said. “You’re catching on. See, Mikhail was taken into custody. I’m away. Mikhail has no one, no ID. He can’t speak for himself, but he was obviously mentally sick. They should have taken him to a hospital, yes?”

“No,” said the old man bitterly. “Turned out the Manhattan DA knew the female victim and pulled strings to have Mikhail booked, put immediately into the system. Without learning the details about Mikhail’s condition. Without thinking about any of the consequences. Do you know the name of the man who was the DA at the time?”

“Mayor Carl Doucette,” I said.

He nodded, smiled.

“The late mayor Carl Doucette,” he said.

“So Mikhail is booked, and there’s no room in Central Booking to hold him, so they send him over to Rikers,” the son said. “My son cannot cope with this. He’s mentally sick, like I say, so he starts freaking. A corrections officer puts him in a room they have in the basement for people not cooperating. This room was over a hundred degrees. They said it was some boiler problem.

“It sure was a problem for Mikhail. They left him there for two days — my son. They forgot about him. My poor Mikhail. New York City boiled my mentally ill son alive.”

“Why did you Emp Yorkville?” I said.

“Mayor Doucette had his mother at Sloan Kettering hospital,” said the old man, smiling again. “The precious old girl didn’t make it during the evac. Shame.”

“And Twenty-Six Federal Plaza?”

“The corrections officer who locked up Mikhail got a new job on the maintenance crew there,” said the old man. “I would have taken down an airliner if he was one of the passengers. To hell with him for slaughtering my grandson and to hell with this city and America. Oh, how you crowed when the Cold War was over; how much greater your country was than ours with your freedoms — or so you thought.

“And now look at yourselves. You have the freedom to land planes at the wrong airports, the freedom to shunt downtown trains onto uptown tracks, the freedom to kill prisoners by accident. Why? I don’t know. All I know is that you’re a pack of fools, and a fool and his civilization are soon parted.

“Because this isn’t over,” he said. “If it takes us twenty years, we’re going to make you bastards pay. I ran the Russian mob in Miami. I have millions of dollars and contacts and access to many interesting things. If you think Krasnyy Navodneniye is the only recipe in the old Soviet book of dirty tricks, think again. You should have thought twice before you fucked with my family!”

“I hear you,” I said, trying to buy some time. “I’m a father myself, and I can’t imagine how horrible it’s been for you. How angry you must be. What happened to Mikhail was a disgusting travesty that deserves justice. But think about all the other Mikhails out there who are going to die over this. You’re right about this decadent Sodom-and-Gomorrah direction we’ve taken of late. But there are still some good people out there.”

“What’s this? A Bible-thumping cop?” said the old man. “Spare the city for the sake of a few good people? Where are they? Who’s good? Wait. Let me guess. You?”

“Sure. I’m not so bad,” I said with a shrug. “Spare it for me. Why not?”

The old man dropped the flail and took out a Glock and pressed it to my forehead.

“If I were God, I might be tempted,” he said as he cocked the hammer. “Too bad for you: I’m the other guy.”

That’s when we heard the noise. A heavy crunching sound followed by glass shattering.

It was coming from upstairs.

The old man still had the gun to my head as the two Russians stared at each other. The old man looked down at me with hate in his eyes, pressing the barrel hard against my head, but then there was another creak of wood. It was a footstep in the room directly above, and the younger man put a finger to his lips and the cold metal lifted away.

He cut a piece of duct tape and wrapped it around my mouth before the two of them went out the door. The massive shoot-out erupted thirty seconds later. Automatic gunfire in the next room starting and stopping and starting again. I hit the deck just before a round ripped a hole in the cheap wooden door.

Twenty seconds after that, I heard it. The three words I’d been praying for.

“He’s in here!” Emily said.

“How’d you find me? My phone?” was the first thing I said.

She nodded.

“That find-your-friend app comes in damn handy!” she said, smiling, as she unlocked my cuffed ankle.

“I’m glad we’re friends,” I said, finally standing. “There was an old guy and a younger one. Russians, like we thought. Did you get them?”

“The Filipovs. We heard. We got the younger one. He got hit and they found him a block away. They’d bugged out of a cellar door we missed.”

“What about the old bastard? He said he was KGB. Evil as a snake.”

“Not yet. But we have the whole neighborhood surrounded. He’s on foot.”

Emily handed me my Glock and I stumbled up the basement stairs behind her. Golly tamale, did it feel good in my hand at that moment. I could have kissed both it and her. They must have found it at the crash scene.

We went outside through the front door. I was shocked to see that the building was a small brick house at the dead end of a leafy residential street. To the right of it was a huge school or something — several dark buildings with a large empty parking lot beyond the guardrail at the end of the street.